Author's Note: Well, here's another problem with anachronisms: those three big rifles Whip encounters are meant to be Barret M82s, a .50 BMG anti-materiel rifle. With Whip not being versed on firearms I was gonna have her recognize them from the movie Robocop, where the fictional 'Cobra Assault Cannon' was just an M82 with a little 'futuristic' plastic added to it.

Of course Robocop didn't come out until 1987, so that's a no-go.

Not an important point or anything, but it's just kind of annoying. I got so annoyed at that fact that I decided to include another weapon from the Robocop movie just for good measure. And it's a slightly more practical little number.

But now I want to imagine Whip getting her hands on an M82 and dragging it in all its 30-pound glory around the Aurelia Arms, propping it up on furniture near doorways to ambush cultists at point-blank range. She'd lose her eardrums, sure, but the cultists would lose a lot more than that...

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"Try for the Kingdom"

Trenton – 1984

The door burst open, squealing on unoiled hinges.

Her eyes trembled under their lids; she tightened her hands against her kneecaps; her toes curled up against the cherry pink fabric of her bedspread.

"Whatcha doin' here in the dark, Dubs?"

Slowly, ever so slowly, the little girl kneeling on her bed opened her eyes. Her entire prepubescent body was tensed, wound as tight as a piano's strings. Her jaw quaked, and even her head trembled, making that frizzy forest of wild hair sprouting off her scalp dance.

She watched the figure stumble into the room, their body bathed in light from the open doorway. They moved unnaturally, supported by braces and a metal cane. But every shuffle and stumble was as natural and familiar to the girl as the beats of an old song.

"Dubs... you been' cryin'?"

That name again. It made her heart race, beating almost as fast as a small bird's. Not that bird, though. No. Even back then she hated her name— 'Willa'— but this was from before she disappeared, dressing herself up in all that 'tough girl' camouflage and flying off to hide. This was before the bird.

This was just 'Dubs'.

And he was...

She ground her small teeth together, and it didn't take long for the waterworks to start. The figure moved quicker, getting his broken body over to her bedside and setting himself on the edge, grunting in discomfort as he adjusted the braces spanning one leg. She wasted no time collapsing into his lap, bawling as he ran one hand over her head.

"I've missed you too, Dubs," he said. "Wanted to see you again, for so long..."

The girl lifted her head out of his lap; her lips trembled as she tried to speak, tears kissing the corners of her lips.

The figure shook his head.

"It wasn't your fault, Dubs. Never was. You runnin' off and bein' on your own must've felt easier than dealing with that, though. Same as him, in a way, isn't it? Funny, that..."

Her brow furrowed, she sat up and scooted back into a kneeling position, wiping a small snot bubble from her nose.

"What happened to him also ain't your fault." The figure hobbled to his feet, clutching his cane with one hand and adjusting the braces on his opposite leg with the other hand. "Kid's just a prince who was never gonna be king, after all. And you're still just a li'l girl— just 'Dubs'— no matter the scars or muscles or the tough looks you got on the outside."

The figure moved to a dresser at the far wall and stopped; he picked through a stack of comic books resting atop it, examining the covers and casually tossing them to the ground in turn.

"An' with him it wasn't ever 'long odds' or the like; it was really impossible, I guess. Fantastical. That might be the word." The figure looked over his shoulder at her. "Then again I always had me a soft spot for the 'fantastical'..."

The figure set his cane beside the dresser. He walked back over to the bed, moving with perfectly even steps, sure as a metronome, and he effortlessly knelt down at eye-level with the girl.

"Your li'l prince needs himself one fantastical sidekick, I'd reckon. Wouldn't be your fault if you didn't go for it; it'd be like tryin' for the impossible, after all."

The figure ran one hand over the girl's cheek, brushing off her tearstain with his thumb.

"But if you tried for somethin' like that? Well, there's somethin' fantastical about that, too, isn't there?"

A smile.

A smile warm as the sunrise.

She reached out with her tiny hands to grab at him, but then that vulgar white light from the door spilled in, searing all in its hot, boiling beam.

X

X

X

Whip jolted awake, bouncing her head off the tartan backpack and catching her handcuffs on the metal pole.

Mister Slappy, still manning his console in the dark basement room, looked over his shoulder at her with a cold scowl.

"So soon?" He grumbled. "I can't give you any more of that stuff without probably killing your dumb little ass, but like I said before: my orders don't involve keeping your bones and teeth in place. And you don't have that soft-hearted fuadain here to keep you safe, now. It's just you and me, so keep quiet or I'll break your jaw."

Whip's head still floated like an untethered balloon. She gripped the folds of Penance's backpack to steady herself. As she did one hand clamped down on a small, familiar shape lurking underneath the fabric, and the feeling of it sent a wave of electricity up her spine. She looked up at Mister Slappy, eyes wide, and she said nothing. The man merely scoffed at her spacy display and returned to his consoles.

Whip reached into the backpack with one hand, moving as slow and cautious as if she were reaching into a cobra's den. She watched the man with his back to her and slowly her spacy stare began to change, even as her head tilted to one side. By the time it stopped moving her eyes were neither vapid nor spacy. They were very unlike a bird's, as well.

Not counting a raptor, anyway.

The girl licked her lips, and for a brief moment all her thoughts tuned on what she was about to do, and whether it would be wise to do it. She had no answer for that second question, but it wasn't about to stop her, in any event.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "For causin' trouble, I mean."

Mister Slappy again looked over his shoulder at her, this time with a curious scowl.

"How's that?" He grumbled his words through a tightly shut jaw, bearing menacing teeth. The tight-wound movement made the arteries in his neck twitch and strain.

The girl batted her lashes, letting her voice warble with an overly feminized affectation.

"About the trouble. I shouldn't be trouble for her. No one should. Nicnevin just doesn't deserve it, the poor dear—"

Mister Slappy pointed at the girl.

"I told you not to mention—"

"She had it rough, you know, before she got all 'immortalized'; she was one funny lady, in fact."

Slappy's eyes widened; the muscles in his neck twitched as he ground his teeth together.

"She don't get to talkin' much about herself, does she?" Whip innocently cocked her head, looking up at the man with doe-like eyes. "I mean, she did with Penance, and he did with me. Oh, he told me all about the poor dear— the 'Grand Dame of Uerturio', right? Sad story, that! She got herself run out of town by the other womenfolk after her brothel got too popular and she got to fuckin' every man in sight, nonstop."

Mister Slappy jumped up from his chair, and in his face was all the fires that hell could provide. By now his head looked ready to pop off his neck; the giant arteries spanning either side of his neck bulged out and throbbed with each heartbeat.

"Galla!" He roared.

"Now, of course they also call her the 'Lady of Fortriu'. An' oh: Fortriu! Well it wasn't a brothel, then, but they caught her and one of the goats on a farm, see, an' the thing was balls deep in her, and now she claimed the goat came on to her, but the townsfolk weren't havin' that one, and they finally decided to hang her wrinkly ol' ass—"

The man went to his knees before Whip and wrapped his hands around her throat, cutting off her words and popping out her eyes with the pressure. His face tuned red with the effort and those arteries in his neck twitched ever faster, even as he continued shouting in that nonsensical Scottish-talk. Whip's face quickly went from a fine shade of red to a more purple hue; a froth of spit curled down the corner of her mouth as her balloon-like head finally started coming down to Earth. She sagged in the man's grip, her eyes ready to burst from her skull and her throat ready to cave in like a soda can.

Before losing consciousness Whip pulled back her cuffed hands as far as the chain against the pipe would allow and then, fists interlocked, she made a weak effort at punching against Mister Slappy's neck. With empty hands such a gesture would, naturally, be futile.

Whip's hands were not empty.

The tip of the syringe plunged straight into Mister Slappy's carotid artery— a one in a hundred shot, given the circumstances— and Whip fumbled with the plunger, at first getting only resistance and no movement even as the man barked in surprise and started pulling up away from her. Finally, just before he moved out of reach, the girl gave the thing one final fierce push with all the strength her hand could muster. The plunger went down with sickening ease— more an 'explosion' than 'injection'— and when Mister Slappy ripped the needle from his neck and tossed it aside it bounced across the cold concrete floor in a series of reedy, hollow pings.

The man's eyes twitched and he fell to his rear; he gave Whip a stunned look before a horrible white froth began spurting from his lips and nose. He coughed, his throat heaving, and his eyes rolled back in his head so far Whip thought the pupils might come around the other way. He tried to skitter his shaking body back towards his consoles but Whip gripped one of his legs tight, holding on like a mutton buster atop an ornery sheep. Mister Slappy collapsed to his back, blowing white froth from his mouth like a whale belching through its blowhole. He belted out a string of hellish, nonsensical noises from his convulsing throat. Soon those convulsions stopped, although it took a while longer for the froth on his face to stop sizzling.

Whip, still holding one of his legs for dear life, kept her eyes screwed shut and didn't dare move a muscle until a full minute later, finally looking up at the man. She slowly got up to her rear and examined the frozen, terrified face of the late Mister Slappy. The ugly rivers of froth around his lips and nose were starting to curl down the sides of his face, dripping on the concrete floor in uneven droplets. She thought to wipe the froth from her own face, and then for the next few minutes couldn't think of much at all.

She finally snapped out of her stupor, again looking down at the dead man. She thought about saying something cheeky and cutting at his expense, but all she got out of her mouth was another little dribble of spit. She again wiped her mouth and then set to dragging Mister Slappy's body back to her, straining against the pipe for leverage against his weight until his boiler suit and all its pockets were within reach. A few minutes of fumbling produced the key to her cuffs, and she unlocked the restraints and discarded them on Slappy's chest.

She stared down at the dead man, and her heart raced in syncopated abandon. She could scarcely comprehend the corpse below her; the only thing she could manage to do was think back to Penance's first kill. He was in his 50s then, wasn't he?

But then he was still a little kid. Kind of.

Maybe.

Whatever.

The point is that Whip didn't think she quite needed a burly Norman forge-master to cry to at the current moment, but she'd have taken one if offered.

Whip found a black pistol wedged into a holster at Slappy's waist, and it was wedged but good. With a little elbow grease she freed it and took it up awkwardly, handling it like an egg. She carefully tuned it over and examined it under the wan red light of the room; the slide was very much the worse for wear, probably from repeatedly scraping against that too-tight holster. There were faint words etched into the side of the pistol but between the weapon's wear and the room's poor light all Whip could make out was a single word: 'Pietro'. The weapon's magazine was long, extending down from the base of the gun. The barrel had a strange little extension that poked out beyond the front; it was scored with three grooves on either side, cut all the way through the metal. That loop around the trigger— the 'guard', right?— was a lot longer than what she was used to seeing in TV and movies, and a strange metal handle was screwed to the end of the guard; it could be folded down or up, but Whip couldn't fathom its function.

She ventured to grip the gun's slide and ease it back— she remembered from movies how a pistol like this should move— and after a few fumbling attempts she managed to get it all the way back, promptly ejecting a bullet onto the floor. The sound made her wince and nearly drop the gun, but she regained her composure and went looking for the discarded round.

The low light of the room certainly didn't help matters, and in her search she found a bank of switches against one wall, one of them labeled 'main basement light'. She flipped it, and with a crackling hum a few fluorescent tubes sparked to life. Whip turned around to continue her search for the missing bullet, and then her eyes went wide as dinner plates.

In the far corner of the room, once bathed in darkness, a long row of thick bars and a padlocked metal door stood before a massive wall of particle board. It was scoured with an even series of holes from top to bottom. Set into these holes were countless metal brackets. Resting upon those brackets were enough guns— of every conceivable size and configuration— to film a dozen different Hollywood blockbusters at once.

There were black rifles like the ones from a Vietnam movie, and sleek little handguns like in a spy film, complete with silencers and big magazines that stretched way down below the butts, even further than the pistol in her hands. There were boxy-looking little machine-gun-like things— 'Uzi's', right? Or something like them at least— and then some really teeny-tiny handguns that was so small they could be held three to a bracket. At the opposite end of the spectrum were three massive rifles in a row at the bottom of the wall; they were so large that they took up most of the wall's length. Their thick barrels protruded from a kind of sheath riddled with holes at even intervals. Two of the rifles had a strange looking pair of metal rods running along the underside of the barrels; the third one's rods were detached and hung down like a pair of little metal feet.

In her dazed state Whip actually took the time to analyze this feature, turning the problem over in her head for a good thirty seconds before realizing those things must be little props to hold the guns up while you fired from a lying-down position; those rifles certainly didn't look like the kind of things you'd just shoot from the hip.

"Not if you wanna keep that hip, anyway," she mumbled.

Eventually the girl recovered enough of her senses to give the proper reaction to this arsenal before her, and she managed to express it with her own natural eloquence.

"Holy fucking shit!"